| Summary: | Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel Parade’s End (1924-1928) is an Anglo-American coproduction by BBC and HBO. The narrative portrays the story of a love triangle –the self-proclaimed ‘last Tory’ Christopher Tietjens, his wife the fickle and unfaithful Sylvia, and the young suffragette Valentine Wallop – trapped in the turmoil of the First World War.The mini-series, which was broadcast in 2012 on BBC and in June 2013 on ARTE, rests on an elliptical presentation of events, analeptic passages, and a subtle use of imagery. The show is a truly stylistic feat which brings to mind the way in which Raul Ruiz filmed his last film released in 2010, Mysteries of Lisbon.The present paper analyses the way in which all these elements enhance the subtle structure of this work of fiction. We will first explore how Susanna White uses imagery which draws heavily on Vorticism – one has obviously in mind the works of Wyndham Lewis – to depict the “great collapse” (François Furet) which affected not only continental Europe but also the entire Edwardian world. We hope to show how White’s visual treatment throws into sharp relief the narrative’s mosaic structure. We shall then study the recurrent mirror motif which contributes to the mise en abyme effect that characterizes Stoppard’s adaptation; before considering how the war scenes are handled throughout the series by comparing them with the way in which cinema and literature have depicted the conditions in which the soldiers survived in the trenches. Finally, we will see how Parade’s End obliquely echoes the traumatic effect of the Great War on those who survived, by comparing it with the American TV series, Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), produced by Terence Winter and broadcast on HBO.
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